First Lady Jill Biden was married at the age of 18 to her first husband. Eventually the relationship collapsed, and she found herself divorced with no income and home in her mid-20s. While getting over the breakup was painful, it also taught her a financial lesson she will never forget.
“I knew I would never, ever put myself in that position again – where I didn’t feel like I had the finances to be on my own, that I had to get money through a divorce settlement,” Dr. Biden told Harper’s Bazaar in a cover interview that appeared in its June-July issue. The magazine said it was the first time in its 155-year history that an American First Lady appeared on its cover.
Dr. Biden, 70, recounted declining her parents’ offer to let her move back home after the divorce. Instead, she saved enough money to rent a one-bedroom town house and finished the classes she needed to graduate. She went on to become a teacher and eventually married Joe Biden in 1977.
Her first divorce also taught her a crucial lesson about independence, which she passed on to her own children and grandchildren.
“I drummed that into [my daughter], Ashley: Be independent…And my granddaughters – you have to be able to stand on your own two feet,” Dr. Biden told the magazine. To this day, Dr. Biden still teaches three classes a week, noting her work has always allowed her to have her own safety net and personal freedom.
“I understand a woman’s need to have something for herself,” she said.
Dr. Biden is also the first to admit that even the first couple gets into their fair share of disagreements. She revealed that during the Obama years, she and her husband, then vice president, ironed out their differences over text to avoid fighting in front of Secret Service, a practice they called “fexting.” During one disagreement, she recounted how her husband told her, “You realize that’s going to go down in history. There will be a record of that,” alluding to how all presidential communication is kept for historical record. She told Mattie Kahn, who profiled Dr. Biden for Harper’s, “I won’t tell you what I called him that time.”
At the end of the day, however, Dr. Biden calls herself her husband’s fiercest supporter.
“I try to be a support for Joe, because I don’t know how many people are saying to him, ‘That was great. That was brilliant.’ I try to be that person for him,” she said. “Some days, I see Joe and I’m just like, ‘I don’t know how you’re doing it.’ It’s the pandemic and then it’s the war and then it’s the economy and then it’s the gas prices. You feel like you’re being slammed.”